UMPlayer Media Player – One Of Open-Source’s Best kept Secrets

Well, it comes down to choice. A box of chocolates (oh dear here I go with analogies…) would be boring if each individual sweet tasted the same as the next. And that’s sort of the case with desktop applications: you need to try a few rubbish ones before you hit upon the one you really like.

And that’s where todays choice – UMPlayer – comes in.

UMPlayer

UMplayer – Universal Multimedia Player – is a cross-platform fork of popular Qt media player SMPlayer, which, in turn, is based on MPlayer.

Despite the complicated linage UMPlayer is much, much more than a rebranded, repackaged ‘app clone’: UMPlayer comes with jam-packed with neat features and tools.

YouTube Playback and Downloading

One of the ‘unique’ features present in UMPlayer is the ability to search, play and ‘record’ (download) YouTube videos.

The search box is present in the main screen at all times, whilst search results present themselves in a small popup window.

You are able to set the default playback quality for YouTube video – from 360p to full 1080p – as well as choosing the quality and file format for downloaded videos via the ‘preferences’ menu.

Skins

I generally like my desktop applications to “match” my system theme but UMPlayer doesn’t do this.

In fact the default ‘theme’ of UMPlayer leaves a lot – and I mean a lot – to be desired: –

Thankfully the inclusion of some slick skins more than makes up for it. My favourite is the ‘Modern’ skin which is used in most of the screenshots on this page. It also has one of the nicest OSD control bars I’ve ever seen on a Linux media player: –

Subtitles

As someone who relies on subtitles when watching a lot of non-English language TV shows and movies, I really appreciate the built-in subtitles search n’ downloader.

Subtitles font, size and colour are also configurable via the ‘Preferences’ dialog.

Options for subtitle delay – useful for when things go out of sync – can be accessed via the ‘Subtitles’ menu in the application menu bar.

Playback bonanza

UMPlayer comes, by default, with over 270 built-in audio and video codecs so it should be able to play most formats that you chuck at it, including standard formats such as AVI, DIVX, FLV and MOV, as well as Matroska, WMV, RealMedia, AAC and more.

Flaws

Similarly, unlike the Windows and OS X versions, the Linux build of UMPlayer also lacks CPU optimisation. Unless you’re on a netbook or severely hardware limited computer chances are this won’t affect you too much – but it would still be a nice ‘have’.

Download

UMPlayer 0.95 is available to install from the Ubuntu Software Centre, no PPA needed. Hit the button below to begin installation.

Easy-to-install .DEB installers for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04 are also available from the projects’ official development page: –